“What is it?” I ask as my friend, Oumou, who is handing me the other end of a piece of dark meat.
As I hold the meat, she tugs on one end to shred it. It takes some tugging to separate the tough pieces. It will end up in the marre maffe (peanut sauce) for lunch today. She responds with a word that I struggle to understand. Between pulling pieces of meat apart, I look up the word in my Pular-English Dictionary and the translation is literally ‘wild animal.’
“Not much to go off of,” I say aloud to my book.
Oumou looks up, “Ko hondun?” – ‘What?’ She asks, looking at me, with her forehead scrunched up.
I try again, “Is it a monkey?” She laughs at me and shakes her head.
“Is it a bat?” She laughs harder, doubling over.
She drops the thick, shredded pieces of meat into the boiling pot of sauce, “It’s bigger than a cow,” She says, holding her hands apart to demonstrate the size.
“Is it a hippo?” I ask, even more confused now.
“Djenabu, if this was hippo, the whole village would be eating,” She replies, gesturing at the remaining meat hanging from the ceiling of the kitchen hut; she was right that there wasn’t much of it to speak of.
After a series of charades and poor drawings on my part, I determine to the best of my ability that the meat that I have just helped Oumou prepare is nothing more than a bushbuck.The conversation ended there, while Oumou sliced bitter tomatoes.
We are sitting in Oumou’s kitchen hut on squat, wooden stools. It’s 107 degrees outside and even hotter in the hut with the fire burning. She is wearing a checkered wrap skirt, closely resembling a long kilt and a pair of blue, plastic flip-flops. Her breasts are bare and sweat is collecting on her shoulders and forehead as she stokes the fire. Oumou’s daughter, Amanta, approaches us. Even after seeing me almost every day for 5 months, she remains shy and overly-polite around me. She greets me with a handshake and a curtsey, before settling herself on two long pieces of bamboo just outside the door. How she manages to stay balanced on them amazes me. Oumou hands her a flat, woven basket with roasted peanuts in it, “Weesu,” She instructs her daugher, and Amanta begins shaking the basket back and forth.
Amanta pauses periodically to scrunch handfuls of the hot peanuts and I attempt to help her. Her knobby knees are locked together as she concentrates on gently shaking the basket back and forth. My arms, neck, and face are slick with sweat and the light peanut skins stick to me, almost as soon as they take flight from the basket in her hands.
As soon as the peanuts are skin-free, Amanta walks them over to a hand-grinder and dumps the basket of peanuts into the top of the grinder. She glances over at me every couple of minutes while she does this and giggles. She asks if I have ever seen a peanut grinder before. I tell her that I have, but that usually people in the US buy jars of pre-ground peanuts. She asks me if women in the US make marre maffe. The shortest answer is yes, and I stick with that, before adding that my mom’s husband makes delisious marre maffe. Amanta stops grinding and looks at me, dumbfounded, “You mean, your mom makes delicious marre maffe,” she tries to correct my statement.
“It’s actually her husband who cooks most of the time,” I respond, “because he likes cooking and my mom doesn’t,” I add.
Amanta seems to understand this, bobbing her head up and down slowly as she begins grinding the peanuts again. When she is finished, she brings the bowl into the kitchen hut to her mother and then skips down the hill towards their neighbor’s compound, cutting through the dingira, where the cows normally spend the night.
Within ten minutes, the thick aroma of tomatoes and peanuts wafts out from the kitchen hut and outsteps Oumou, holding a metal bowl with white rice and a plastic yellow cup advertising Adja. Chunks of dark meat are poking up through the thick, brown sauce like toads peeking out of a mud puddle. She sets the bowl down on the ground just as her husband, Mamoudou, pulls up on his motorcycle. He greets me enthusiastically and sits down at the bowl beside me. Oumou hands each of us a spoon and sings for her daughter, “Amanta!” The singing gradually grows more shrill and louder until her wiry daughter returns to the compound.
My host mother selling mangoes in the market and my little sister asleep on the table.
She plops down at the bowl and Ibou, the youngest in the family sits on an empty, metal can beside her. He is two years old, but still breastfeeding. He will only eat a few handfuls of the rice, most of which end up on the ground or on his face, before returning to his mother’s breast, “Bismillah,” Oumou and Mamoudou say together and our spoons and hands are in the bowl together. My first bite of the meat is tough and salty, but without having any protein aside from peanut sauce or crushed peanuts, I have no complaints. In the middle of the meal, two women show up and sit on the outskirts of the bowl. All of us encourage them to eat with us, almost to the point of bullying, but they finally say, “Enough,” and we leave them be until the bow has been licked dry.
The women continue glancing at the bowl, but it isn’t until the end of the meal that they tell us why they are there: they want peas from the tree (locally referred to in French, simply as ‘petit pois’) in Mamoudou and Oumou’s backyard, “How do you prepare them?” Oumou agrees to let the women harvest the peas, but admits that she doesn’t know how to make them.
“You just soak them for 24 hours and then you boil them with pepper, salt, and adja,” one woman says.
“Then you fry them in a pan and put them in bread or in sauce,” The second woman adds as she quickly collects the peas. She collects with new fervor, as if thinking that if Oumou knows how to make the peas, then she will change her mind about offering them to the women.
“Oh,” Oumou looks surprised, “I never knew,” She makes no moves towards the tree, but begins boiling water for tea instead.
The women finally turn to me, as if taking notice of the white person for the first time, “Ko honno inetedaa?” (What is your name?), the first women asks me.
“Djenabou Soure,” I respond.
They giggle together, but not unkindly, as most people do when they hear my Senegalese name. This seems to be in part due to the fact that I understand the question they are asking, but also that my answer is a very common Senegalese name in the Kedougou Region. They ask if I am a Peace Corps Volunteer and then tell them that they are from Togue, which is a neighboring village that has had 4 rounds of successful Volunteers, all of which have spoken excellent Pular. I know this because everyone reminds me.
“Do you have a husband?” The same woman asks me, after a round of greetings. It has become a standard element of greetings in my region and have finally realized that if I respond with ‘yes,’ I am treated with a different kind of social status and people assume that I am older than if I tell them that I am unmarried.
“When is your husband coming?”
“Next year,” I respond, without hesitating.
She nods approvingly, until she looks down at what one of my friends from Alaska called ‘adventure pants, and says, “When your husband comes, you have to wear a skirt,” She points accusingly at my paints, which are stained with dirt from the tree nursery I made that morning.
“I will probably continue wearing pants,” I respond.
“What? And you mean, you’re both going to wear pants?” She laughs the way my grandmother laughs when she tells me I will never be able to continue learning and working, and have a family.
“I like to bike, run, walk, and work in the garden all of which are easier while wearing pants,” she nods slowly, still in disbelief.
Apparently the conversation has ended. She turns her nose up, picks up her bowl of peas that she has collected, and leaves the compound. I suddenly felt insensitive to the fact that many women here would feel that it was socially unacceptable to wear pants, once married. This is what I had seen in my village and those around me so far. I had never seen a married woman wearing pants in village.
Oumou noticed the shift in my face and offered me tea saying, “We just don’t know, Djenabou, but we are trying to know. The men suffer here and because of this, they make the women suffer too.”
We both knew that the conversation went deeper than simply an argument about wearing pants, but we sat sweating together, side-by-side as we sipped our tea in silence, staring at the skinny petit pois tree.
"Can't you just go for two weeks instead of two years?" 
